dwink i owned a company and all i got was this stupid blog

Tethered BlackBerry With Ubuntu

I recently acquired a Blackberry 8703e with tethered internet access, and thought to myself how great it would be if I could use said tethered access from Linux.

Of course, when you're setting up something that isn't officially supported, you're likely to run into a few snags.

The first snag is: The 8703e doesn't expose its serial modem over USB without a handshake of some sort. Luckily for me, there's a brilliant guy who wrote a program to do it, called XmBlackBerry. You can grab it from Sourceforge.

The next snag is: XmBlackBerry uses OpenMotif 2.3. Ubuntu Feisty Fawn comes with 2.2. So, I grabbed the tarball from MotifZone, built it a nd installed it. I put it out in /usr/local so that I wouldn't have to worry about the ubuntu packages freaking out over the different motif versions.

OK. So I can start up the program, it notices the blackberry, and I symlink the new pts ( /dev/pts/X ) to /dev/modem so that I don't have to change the config each connect.

Now I fire up kppp (yeah, I could be a real geek and set up pppd directly, but kppp gives me a lovely little gui I can minimize to my panel and all that happy user-friendly goodness.) and punch in the settings. Unfortunately, though, the kppp default settings for pppd require LCP echoes to be responded to in a reasonable manner. Turn that off (lcp-echo-interval 0 ), and voila! We are connected!